Jeremy Bowen: 'It’s a numbers game – a lot of my friends have been killed’

As well as dodging bombs and bullets, the BBC’s Middle East editor Jeremy
Bowen has to fight off accusations of bias against Israel, but he’s not
apologising.

“I am a defender of the BBC. It gets a lot of stick, which is not deserved. We do journalism that no one else has the will or resources to do. Despite big cuts, we still produce a lot of incredible stuff,” says Jeremy BowenPhoto: Andrew Crowley

This is a good time to be Middle East editor of the BBC. Not only because of the seismic events reshaping the world’s most turbulent region but also the fact that the job has absolutely nothing to do with Jimmy Savile.

“I can’t really talk about all that stuff,” says Jeremy Bowen, with barely concealed relief. “Not that I actually have a great deal to say about it. I didn’t know Jimmy Savile and, of course, I wasn’t involved in the Newsnight investigation.”

Lots of people at the corporation would love to be able to say the same. As senior executives at Broadcasting House dodge metaphorical bullets, Bowen can content himself with trying to avoid the real thing in far-off places. Oh to be in Beirut, now the Beeb-bashing season is here.

“I am a defender of the BBC,” he says, not unnaturally for a man who has known only one employer. “It gets a lot of stick, which is not deserved. We do journalism that no one else has the will or resources to do. Despite big cuts, we still produce a lot of incredible stuff.”

Bowen tries on our behalf to make sense of a part of the world that sometimes appears beyond understanding, beyond healing. There you will find him, on the 10 O’Clock News, on satellite television or radio, in some benighted, often dangerous place, reporting and explaining.

“In newspapers, you have a pretty good idea of your reader,” he says. “With television, the viewer could be anybody. So you try to do pieces that have something in them for people with different levels of background knowledge; a kind of layer cake. The trick is to use a human story to illustrate the bigger picture.”

To provide background, Bowen has written a book, his third, The Arab Uprisings, an account of the Arab Spring that erupted at the beginning of last year. As with the Europe of 1848, regimes that appeared impervious to change have fallen domino-like, from Tunisia to Libya and Egypt. Basher al Assad, dictator of Syria, is widely expected to be next, but his political death throes are proving bloody and protracted. The civil war in Syria is rippling out beyond that country’s borders, into Jordan, Turkey and ominously, Lebanon.

“In Lebanon I interviewed a young politician who told me there has not been a worse crisis than this since the Forties,” says Bowen. “I said, 'You’ve had a civil war that killed 150,000 people.’ He said, 'Yes, that’s true, but the difference was that the rest of the region was for most of that time fairly stable. Now, all around is complete instability. Everything is changing in the region. Lebanon is going to catch a very bad cold.’ The reason why Lebanon is catching a cold is because there are so many connections with Syria.”

Bowen, 52, is a believer in shortening the distance between journalist and story. “I’m not a head office kind of guy,” he explains, while admitting to being a “BBC lifer”.

Born and raised in Cardiff, the son of a BBC reporter, he joined the corporation as a trainee in 1984 after university. His first posting was in financial news, which bored him. Sent to Geneva, he was offered a job by Channel 4, which forced the BBC to sit up and take notice. As a ''foreign fireman’’, he found himself plunged into the Bosnian war of 1992-95. Five years in the Jerusalem bureau followed.

“War reporting? I was all for it. I was ambitious and saw that going to places not everybody wanted to be in was a good way of putting my head above the parapet, raising myself above the crowd, as it were. It was a dangerous cocktail, this combination of adrenalin and a sense of doing something worthwhile, shining a light into the dark corners. I felt pretty indestructible. There was a sense of freedom; there were no rules, except stay alive.”

Fortune has favoured him, but not always his friends and colleagues. In May 2000 he was covering the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon when an Israeli tank commander decided to put a round into his car. Bowen and his cameraman were some distance away and unharmed but his friend and fixer, Abed Takoush, was killed. Abed’s death was followed by the loss of two more of Bowen’s friends in Sierra Leone. Bowen does not consider himself brave. He has described his guilt in not running to the wrecked car immediately to rescue Abed, fearful that he would be killed by the Israelis, too. The deaths traumatised him and he retreated to London, where he spent two years hosting the BBC’s breakfast show. He returned to the field in 2003 and was appointed Middle East editor in 2005.

“What changed my view of risk was the fact that a lot of my friends have been killed,” he says. “I realised it was a numbers game: the more time you spend in a dangerous place, the more likely you are to get hurt. I was lucky, and I still go to places that most people would consider to be quite dangerous.”

There are other hazards to reporting the region, not least charges of bias from both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 2004 the BBC commissioned the Balen Report on its reporting of the Middle East. It subsequently refused to release the document on the grounds that it was the result of an internal editorial exercise. An application under the Freedom of Information Act to have the report made public was rejected by the Supreme Court this year, but the corporation, which reportedly spent £350,000 to keep its findings private, was left facing charges of hypocrisy and a cover-up, amid rumours that its coverage, including Bowen’s, had been found to be anti-Israeli.

Bowen came in for more direct criticism in 2009 when a pro-Israel group in the United States accused him of bias against Israel, citing radio and online reports on the history of the Six Day War. He was said to have breached BBC guidelines on accuracy and impartiality 24 times during the reports, but the BBC Trust only fully or partially upheld three of the allegations. No disciplinary action was taken. “The trust got into an overly complicated complaints procedure which, I think I’m right in saying, they have now simplified. They had a panel of laymen who had to try and pronounce on quite complex issues of Middle Eastern politics and they were non-specialists. I thought the basis on which they made their decision was wrong.”

He also dismisses claims that the death of Abed changed him. “It was very traumatic, but there is a strange narrative put about by certain pro-Israel anti-BBC campaign groups that somehow my brain chemistry was altered by it and I can’t help myself and I have to have a go at Israel whenever I can. It is not the case, I take each case on its merits.”

At the end of his book, Bowen warns of a new fault-line developing in the Middle East, between Sunni and Shia – Sunni Saudi Arabia being obsessed by the threat from Shi’ite Iran. There will be plenty to report on in coming months, not least the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities, with or without American backing.

“The Arabs do not have a desire to become the West,” says Bowen. “They would like Western levels of prosperity – fast food and all that – but people have their own identities. It took a long time for our democracies to evolve and they are not perfect now. The act of voting alone does not create a true democracy but it creates a more representative system. What has changed in much of the Arab world is the fear factor has gone.”

Having children has made him more wary. He has two, aged 11 and nine. What does his wife think of his forays into combat zones?

“Oh, she’s quite used to it. The Middle East is an incredibly consistent provider of interesting news and that’s one reason I’ve stuck with it. I have one of the best jobs in British journalism; it’s an incredible privilege. For a foreign correspondent, the Middle East is streets ahead – if what you’re after is an unquiet life.”

'The Arab Uprisings’ by Jeremy Bowen is published by Simon & Schuster (£20)